About Providence, Divine Action and the Church

In this blog, Terry J. Wright posts thoughts and shares research on the Christian doctrine of providence. This doctrine testifies to God’s provision for all things through creation’s high priest, the man Christ Jesus. However, the precise meaning and manner of this provision is a perpetually open question, and this blog is a forum for discussion of the many issues relating to providence and the place of the Church within God’s action.

Friday, 8 August 2014

Psalm 88 as Permission to Rant

Earlier
this week, I attended Evensong at St Edmundsbury Cathedral in Bury St Edmunds.
The psalm for this service was Psalm 88. This was the first time that I’d ever
heard this particular psalm read during a public service. I guess this psalm in
particular doesn’t lend itself to public worship, at least, not in the ways
that public services are usually conceived and delivered. So what is the point
of this bleakest of psalms?

The
spur for this blog post is a short article from the latest edition of Theology.
Here’s the closing paragraph:

Psalm88is,andhasbeenforthousandsofyears,themeanstobringhonest, sometimesviolent,emotions,toGod.ItallowsustodemandthatGodshouldact inresponsetoourdistress.Angerisarealityofourhumanbehaviourasisthe desireforvengeanceandretaliation.Todenyitistolietoourselvesandtolieto
God. We must be allowed to express the reality of our emotions as they are
expressedintherealityofthepsalmistsituationinPsalm88.Inacultureof praiseandadorationtowardsGod,Psalm88givespermissiontorantatGod,
removing the guilt of those who are angry with God and who feel that their
faithissomehowdiminishedbytheirfeelings.Throughthehonestexpressionof emotion, people
may discover a closer, deeper relationship developing with God. It allows him
toreach
us through that red mist ofanguish.
Psalm 88 gives permission forustovoiceourstrugglestoreconcileourselveswithwhatwebelieveGodinall hispowerandmightintendsforusandourworld,whenwearesurroundedby disaster,violenceanddespair.

Jameson
makes the point succinctly: ‘In a culture of praise and adoration towards God,
Psalm 88 gives permission to rant at God’. There is no easy resolution to pain,
and lament accompanies the path from loss to wholeness while recognising that
the path cannot be avoided. A church culture that denies the necessity of this
path is a church that doesn’t know how to handle the darkest human emotions and
doesn’t know how pastorally to care for one another.

A
few years ago, I wrote a paper on Psalm 88 and argued something similar to
Jameson, but also linked it to the Eucharist. Here’s my conclusion:

To conclude,
let us consider one further way in which a space may be provided for people to
worship in all circumstances. Holy Communion was once the central practice of
our services, the place where the Church met with God. Unfortunately, it has
been usurped somewhat by our musical worship. How might a renewed emphasis on
Communion help us to grieve as well as praise?

Traditionally,
Communion is the place where the worshipping community of the Church meets with
God as it remembers Christ. This is no mere recollection but both a remembrance
of his sacrificial death and the risen Christ’s promised return; as the liturgy
puts it, ‘Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.’ These three
aspects are important because they address the importance of appropriate
worship in suffering.

First, in
remembering that ‘Christ has died’, we recognise that Christ’s body is the body
broken, that his blood is the blood shed. To participate in Communion
is to remember that in his own life, at least according to Mark’s Gospel,
Christ experienced the absence of God and died without resolution: ‘My God, my
God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mark 15:34) In uttering this anguished
question, Christ identifies closely with the persistent cry of Heman in Ps. 88.
Though our musical worship often gives thanks to God for Christ’s suffering, we
tend not to consider what it meant even for Christ to face God’s absence. The
Communion meal redresses this balance.

However,
secondly, ‘Christ is risen’. The Church moves from considering Christ’s death
to acknowledging his resurrection. Though Christ endured immense pain, it was
not for nothing; in the redemptive purposes of God, the cross was the essential
means by which God reconciled all things to himself through Christ (Colossians
1:20). In triumphing over death by the cross (Colossians 2:15), Christ has
removed the sting from death (1 Corinthians 15:54-57) that so over-shadowed
both himself in Mark’s account of the crucifixion and Heman’s fear in Ps. 88. There
is real cause for celebration in Communion!

Yet whilst
Christ is risen, the Church is not; this sounds a more eschatological note as
we remind ourselves that, thirdly, ‘Christ will come again’. Paul writes, ‘For
as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death
until he comes’ (1 Corinthians 11:26, my emphasis). By participating in
Communion, the Church eagerly awaits its final consummation. This, of course,
is a future consummation; for this reason, the Communion meal roots the
Church in the present age and discourages it from the delusion that Christ’s
victory over death has removed not just its sting but its existence, too.

Such
importance indicates that the Communion meal is no simple recollection. Through
the activity of the Holy Spirit, the bread and the wine are used as vehicles
through which the Church may know of Christ’s presence; but the Spirit’s
activity here only serves to emphasise that for the moment, Christ is also
absent. He is not bodily present, but sits at the right hand of the
Father (e.g. Ephesians 1:20), even though he also dwells in our hearts
(Ephesians 3:17). For the suffering Christian, the Communion meal deals both
with the absurdity of belonging to the absent Christ and the hope of future
resolution. The meal is both an emetic that recognises human suffering and a
sumptuous feast that delights in the promise of resolution when its risen Lord
returns. In practice, the meal is the place where Christians paradoxically may
meet with the absent God, and the inclusion of a psalm such as Ps. 88 that
wrestles with the experience of exclusion can only serve to elaborate upon this
mystery and thus broaden the scope and resonance of our worship.